Who He Is
Ivan Nikolayevich, a young poet with the pseudonym Bezdomny, author of an antireligious poem written on commission, whom Berlioz asks to stop portraying a Jesus with negative traits and to start denying that he ever existed. He is the witness to Berlioz's death and the first to tell the truth about that night, and for that reason the first to be committed.
Yes, it was approximately ten o'clock in the morning, respected Ivan Nikolayevich
Trajectory
In chapter 3 he sees Berlioz die under the tram; in chapter 4 he concludes from the name Annushka that the foreigner knew everything, chases the three of them across Moscow, leaves an apartment with a candle and a paper icon and loses his clothes in the river; and in chapter 5 he arrives in his drawers at the Griboyedov restaurant. He answers with a slap a man who, summoned as a doctor, tries to calm him, and is taken bound to the psychiatric hospital.
He has appeared! You must catch him at once, otherwise he will cause indescribable misfortunes!
W, w, w... Wa... Wo... Washner? Wagner? Weiner? Wegner? Winter?
In chapter 6 the duty doctor at Stravinsky's clinic (see Stravinsky's clinic) diagnoses him with the word the consultant had already mentioned, and the poet Ryukhin goes back to Moscow brooding over the exactness of the insults he heard from him; in chapter 8, Ivan, faced with Doctor Stravinsky's chained logic, agrees to declare himself normal. In chapter 11, alone in his room, he gives up the denunciation and splits in two, and the dispute is settled by a voice that sounds like the consultant's.
Motor and verbal excitation... delusional interpretations... a complex case, apparently... Schizophrenia, we must suppose. And, on top of that, alcoholism...
Ivan's answer comes thought out and said firmly: he liked the proposal, which seemed to him the way out of the clinic, and the doctor's logic only comes after it.I am normal.
An idiot!
In chapter 13 he receives through the balcony the visit of the master, who hears the whole account and confirms what Ivan was still resisting accepting. In chapter 15, after the alarm of the nightmare of Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, he falls asleep again, already dreaming of Golgotha.
In this chapter, Ivan hears confirmed, from inside the asylum itself, what no one in Moscow wanted to believe when he himself tried to tell it: that the consultant he met at Patriarch's Ponds, in chapter 1, was the devil.
In chapter 30 the master visits room 117 for the last time to say goodbye to Ivanushka. In the Epilogue Ivan is a professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy, cured except for one symptom: every spring full moon (see the Moon) he returns to the bench at Patriarch's Ponds and, after his wife's injection, dreams of Pilate and Yeshua on the lunar path and of the master and Margarita.
In the dream of the Epilogue, the master confirms the ending to him:
It ended like that, my disciple
What a vile execution! Please tell me [...] that it did not take place! I beg you, tell me, it did not happen?
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that run through him are Madness, Reason and Memory and the Past. The reading of chapters 30 to 32 and of the Epilogue on what only he keeps:
The Epilogue repeats, on a comic scale, the same movement as chapter 1, the rationalist refusal to admit the supernatural. Berlioz dies without believing what was announced to him; the entire city survives by not believing, trading the fright for an explanation of collective hypnosis. The novel does not correct this refusal, it merely shows its price: whoever does not believe is left with the poorer version of the story, and only Ivan, who accepted having gone mad, keeps inside what the official explanation never touched.
Ivan begins on the bench at Patriarch's Ponds and returns to it at every full moon: on the first page he is the poet whom Berlioz teaches to deny Jesus, in the Epilogue he is the cured professor who sits there and then, at home, dreams of the procurator. Between the two ends he twice accepts the version that protects him, that he is normal, at Stravinsky's clinic, and that he was the victim of hypnosis, in the Epilogue, and in both there is a remainder the version does not cover: the consultant's voice in chapter XI and the full moon.
Relationships
- Berlioz: the editor who commissions from him the denial of Jesus and whose death he witnesses.
- Woland: the foreigner of Patriarch's Ponds, whom he chases without being able to remember the name.
- The Master: the neighbor in the asylum who reveals to him whom he spoke with and calls him disciple.
- Margarita: appears with the master in the dreams of the Epilogue.
- Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notzri: the story he hears at Patriarch's Ponds and dreams of until the Epilogue.